The Vita Homebrew Bounty
Important note from wololo: This article seems to generate a bit of controversy so let me make things clear: this is not an official contest or bounty endorsed by our site, but an initiative by one of our members. I cannot guarantee that the money being pledged will effectively be donated, except for the $200 that I myself pledged. My contribution to the bounty will increase with time, but it is the only contribution I can effectively guarantee.
I don’t know if you noticed but i started a bounty thread for enabling homebrew on Vita about a month ago. As we just hit two grand, i guess it is the best time to write an article about it.
As soon as i bought my Vita (1000 series), i fell in love with it. I was crazy about the gorgeous OLED screen, dual sticks (yes sticks, not nubs) and the best graphics i ever saw on a handheld. Uncharted could easily be considered a PS3 game. After buying and playing about 5-6 games, my interest slowly faded. Yes, there were some good games, but really, there wasn’t enough of them. After the release of Playstation 4 and the announcement of Sony about how we will see less AAA games for Vita, my suspicions were confirmed. There would never be another Uncharted, another Killzone or any new God of War. Such a waste of a great hardware.
These days, i rarely play any Vita games on my Vita. I play PS1 games, PSP games and PSP homebrews on it. Nearly every PSP stuff looks great on Vita, thanks to the OLED screen. Unfortunately PSP’s horse power is limited and the interest in PSP homebrew scene is fading away. Sony might have abandoned Vita, but we, dedicated developers and users might make the Vita shine just as PSP did.
It has been stated several times that Vita is hard to hack. It seems Sony learned their lesson from PSP. After about 3 years and 4 months from its release, there is still no public way to execute native ARM code on Vita. There is work for that generally around the webkit exploit depending on ROP, but it is still not at the stage where you can code your own homebrew in C, compile it and just run it on your Vita in an easy way. I decided to make a bounty about this with the hope to take a small part in making a healthy Vita homebrew scene possible.
Fundraisers/Bounties are not easy to setup. There are always trust issues. Check this out for how someone got away with an amount over $2000 and he is (was) a respected dev. There may also be legal issues. It is also hard to collect the money in a safe way, transfer the money again in a safe way and make most of the donators happy.
Ideal way would be hosting the donations in a pool account (preferably a Paypal account). I couldn’t do that as i guessed it would easily go over a grand and Paypal is known to shut down accounts without warning. So i decided to let people donate to the dev directly without a pool account. This would make things simpler for me but unfortunately it has the problem that people do not keep their promises and not make the donations they pledged after the release. It is a risk i have to take.
Without further ado, here is the link to The Vita Homebrew Bounty Thread. It is now at $2000. Even though i stated it clearly in the thread, i want to state it again here. I have no way to force people donate the promised amounts after the release, all i can do is list the pledges in the thread. Though you will see familiar, reputable nicks in the list, which can guarantee some amount. Also wololo is one of the donators and he guarantees $200 for now and he says it will grow in time.
My dream is to have something like Ninjhax on Vita. It is free, customizable and it has a good documentation.
So what do you think about this bounty? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
/Talk Link: The Vita Homebrew Bounty Thread
As noted in the thread, count me (my money) in.
Sounds very interesting wololo let the game begin…good luck bounty hunter.
“Nearly every PSP stuff looks great on Vita, thanks to the OLED screen”
I wholeheartidly disagree, I don’t like how the Vita stretches the resolution of the PSP games
Regardless, good luck with the bounty, hope this helps the hacking community as a whole.
Did you try disabling/enabling bilinear filtering? You can do so in the menu you get from holding the PS button (touch screen on older firmwares) and clicking on Settings while playing a PSP game.
This might help you get the quality you want. After all the Vita uses a screen with a resolution of 960×544 pixels, which is exactly twice as high and twice as wide as the PSP’s screen. So basically every PSP pixel gets placed into 4 pixels on the Vita screen, which makes for a perfect scaling match, when bilinear filtering is disabled. With filtering enabled however it will smooth those pixels out and that might not look as nice and sharp as it did on the PSP.
I haven’t used my Vita for a while, but from what I remember, it kinda just blurs out the lines. It makes it look as good as possible, don’t get me wrong, but the fact is that PSP games are plagued with aliasing, and the higher res screen brings that out. PS1 games look about the same from what I remember though.
Well, as I have already participated in two bounties, my $10 will be donated as well. I think it has it’s good and bad sides. It will, inevitably, get some attention and motivation to hack the vita. Also, it will compensate the dev for the hours upon hours of coding and work put into it. As we all know the devs and creators of hacks and exploits barely get any donations for this. However, it almost makes it tacky as well to have to resort to paying people to hack a console. I have heard both sides and agree with both sides. In the end, I suppose if it’s your cup of tea, donate. If it isn’t, then skip it. Always up to you!
It can also cause people to wait until a bounty is put up for them to release a hack or an exploit that they have. It can do good and it can harm.
There is no problem with waiting to release a hack. People put the money in the pot expecting to lose it. The longer the hacker waits to release it, the more FWs it will work on.
Good luck 2x Good luck you!!
I really want to make a port of dolphin emu on vita. Or ps2 emu.
Vita is powerful enough to handle these emulators.
Just imagine to play resident evil 4, silent hill 4, crash bandicoot ps2 series.
It’ll be really fantastic idea. Also it bring the life on it again.
No, it’s not. Just because the PSP handled the PS1, does not mean the PSV can handle PS2. Even modern day PCs with the latest emulators have trouble with compatibility and performance. I really doubt even Sony could pull it off. If we did it, it would end up like how the N64 emulation is on the PSP: barely functioning. And the Vita would never be able to handle GC emulation.
I pledged .. a little as well.
A neat idea but is this really the only way to encourage dev’s by money? I know you’re pain I was hoping we would get some great games on the Vita, don’t get me wrong “some” of the indies are great. We really need Sony to start giving a f**k about there hardware and really understand how the handheld market works. If not might as well give user the ability to do what they feel like with a $200 device we paid for. If the pool does seem to work and brings out legit devs, I will then donate to the cause.
But if it will be like Ninjhax(which I hope not), we will have to scour gamestops for a specific game cartridge. Then scalpers will be hoarding game copies and we’ll see price inflation of the game to like $400+ because vita is hard to hack like f*ck..
All I want for my vita and is to dump my games onto the internal storage like I do on my PS3 and get DLCs and updates for free(especially with multiple region cartridges) and.. UNDUBS!!
This has to be the first good article on this site.
Only hoping this won’t change the fun of understanding a new (mysterious) device into runs for money in the future.
All I want is customize my vita’s interface, so badly D:
I remember the days of CTF themes for PSP. I frickin’ loved those. (And IRShell too!)
Sadly my PSP 1000 got the wandering analogue stick plague, and died when I tried to solder it to the board.
R.I.P. PSP 1K, you were a wonderful device.
RiP to your 1000 one, my 1000 is also in a sad state (not portable anymore 🙁 )
A good beginning for the vita would be a small app like those letting you make your own ptf themes (don’t remember if it was an official sony tool or not) back in the days.
But yeah ctfs was probably what I liked the most in custom firmwares
Still nostalgic about those early days where modding the “sony waves” was enough to make you happy. xD
i want a firmware hack like it was on psp so i can play nes, snes, gba, without so much hassle… like the psp
You can already do this with eCFW. It’s just that since there’s no native exploit yet, the emulators don’t benefit from the superior hardware, and so things like N64 emulation are no more possible than on the PSP. If we did actually have a native exploit, SNES/GBA and even N64/DS emulation could be perfected. Heck, any system up to 5th gen probably could.
It would be amazing to finally see a Native Vita Exploit and Native Homebrews. But if I am not mistaken, unless Sony releases the SDK for the current Software and the proper Signing and making it so it would be DRM Free so it can be Installed and accessed, it might take a while to get something up and running.
I want to emulate psone games on my vita like pc emulator, with full power, best resolution ! I want to do the best the vita can before I forget it for ever ! I can give a good bounty to save the poor vita 😉
all i want is a native c64 emulator on the vita, im all for this idea, it might help attract dev’s from outside the vita circles too
I too would like to donate to the pool, but also still remain anonymous because ->
Any chance this comes into fruition and then Sony going after the backers of this project? like treat us as accessories?
I don’t think so. If there was a pool account, sony could go after that, but that is not the case in this bounty. Of course this is my opinion.
what i would like to see is a port of PPSSPP. It would make it easier to play backed up umds ad play hombrews. It also sports upscaled textures, so we could have hd psp games.
This would be incredibly redundant. eCFW already allows backups afaik, and you can already do homebrews but not on the Vita itself. Upscaling wouldn’t help much on the Vita’s tiny screen.
welp guess im 22nd. Late to the party
good idea @reprep very good idea thanks ps vita should not be dead… Vita means life you know ,)
Wololo and Reprep, I think release any kind of hacks and expect to people to honor their duty, usually does not have the result we could think. But what about a donation before the release, I mean no one is buying the development, just contributing, I and think most of the people that folow both of you, we do know, this is a trusted site as you are, and all of us that sometime in the past has enjoyed any ninja release, we do know you are not liars, so we can trust on you and donate before the release by stating an amount that when reaching, release should be done, as always this could be a controversy for those that are always expecting everything in a free way.
I only want a hack thats disables the ps tv whitelist. This would be great.
did you guys just use my Youtube thumbnail on your site? at least credit my channel or something…
Apologies about that, will update.
sorry, didn’t notice that.
This is the exact link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJng065jpSk i took it from another place so didn’t notice it was a youtube channel.
Plz someone answer why sony will not relase another graphical game like uncharted for vita ?
Easy answer. Supply and demand. That and Sony’s inability to stand behind a powerful system that still holds competitive promise. Many folks here are just still endeared fans of the PSV. As for me, I couldn’t afford a system and games until very recently, so it was sad to see the scene dying off in the official areas. However, if it can be opened up like the PSP, a lot can be done.